1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a method and an apparatus of selecting an item of a portable terminal, and more particularly, to a method and an apparatus of selecting a plurality of items among items which are arranged one-dimensionally or two-dimensionally.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, portable terminals are being developed into multimedia devices such as a smart phone that allow various supplementary services, such as a digital organizer function, a game function, a schedule management function, etc., to be provided. As portable terminals provide various supplementary services as described above, a user interface (UI) is essential to manage and use the various kinds of supplementary services more conveniently.
There are a plurality of applications that show specific items such as music, photographs, moving images, e-mail, etc. in a list form using a smart phone in which, after directly selecting a plurality of files in a corresponding list, a user executes various functions such as deletion, movement, transmission, sharing, etc.
In such a case, when it is desired to select or cancel a plurality of files from an application (file explorer, gallery or the like) that shows various files existing in the portable terminal, it is necessary to directly select or cancel individual items as illustrated in FIG. 1A (list form) or FIG. 1C (grid form), or select or cancel all the files at once as illustrated in FIG. 1B.
A conventional method of selecting a plurality of list items in the UI appearing in a list form, as described, is to select individual list items one by one, or to select all the list items through an overall selection option and then cancel unnecessary list items to perform selection.
When the list items are selected using the conventional method, as described above, it is not very inconvenient when the number of overall list items is small. However, it is easy to encounter a case where a plurality of files are to be transmitted or applications have a number of list items in a smart device equipped with a high-performance processor and a high-capacity memory. In such a case, the following problems may be encountered.
First, when there are many list items and many of them are selected, it is necessary to select each of the items individually. For example, when there is a list that shows 200 files and it is desired to select 100 files, there is an inconvenience in that a user must directly select 100 list items to be selected unconditionally.
Second, there is a problem in that it is not possible to confirm how many list items have been selected up to now in the overall list, and which files have been selected.